--- title: Robots Doing Dishes: Is Figure 03 Going to Take Over Your Chores? | TIME description: The Figure 03 is a humanoid robot with a lofty goal. The company that makes it, Figure AI, wants to build a machine in the form of a human being, and put the bots to work across the global economy—including in homes. Upon its launch this October, the Figure 03 was capable of doing some domestic tasks like folding clothes and loading a dishwasher, but not without help (it can load the machine, but a human needs to start the wash and help if it drops something). Still, the company has embarked on a mass data collection drive to train the robots’ Helix neural network to better complete more types of tasks. canonical: https://time.com/video/xZkW8qEq/ og:title: Robots Doing Dishes: Is Figure 03 Going to Take Over Your Chores? og:description: The Figure 03 is a humanoid robot with a lofty goal. The company that makes it, Figure AI, wants to build a machine in the form of a human being, and put the bots to work across the global economy—including in homes. Upon its launch this October, the Figure 03 was capable of doing some domestic tasks like folding clothes and loading a dishwasher, but not without help (it can load the machine, but a human needs to start the wash and help if it drops something). Still, the company has embarked on a mass data collection drive to train the robots’ Helix neural network to better complete more types of tasks. og:url: https://time.com/video/xZkW8qEq/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/xZkW8qEq/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Robots Doing Dishes: Is Figure 03 Going to Take Over Your Chores? twitter:description: The Figure 03 is a humanoid robot with a lofty goal. The company that makes it, Figure AI, wants to build a machine in the form of a human being, and put the bots to work across the global economy—including in homes. Upon its launch this October, the Figure 03 was capable of doing some domestic tasks like folding clothes and loading a dishwasher, but not without help (it can load the machine, but a human needs to start the wash and help if it drops something). Still, the company has embarked on a mass data collection drive to train the robots’ Helix neural network to better complete more types of tasks. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/xZkW8qEq/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Robots Doing Dishes: Is Figure 03 Going to Take Over Your Chores? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=64d12124-3dd4-415b-ba20-c58399a7dc13&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=64d12124-3dd4-415b-ba20-c58399a7dc13&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Robots Doing Dishes: Is Figure 03 Going to Take Over Your Chores? [Watch (HLS stream): Robots Doing Dishes: Is Figure 03 Going to Take Over Your Chores?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/xZkW8qEq.m3u8) (6:04)  _Published 2025-10-09. The Figure 03 is a humanoid robot with a lofty goal. The company that makes it, Figure AI, wants to build a machine in the form of a human being, and put the bots to work across the global economy—including in homes. Upon its launch this October, the Figure 03 was capable of doing some domestic tasks like folding clothes and loading a dishwasher, but not without help (it can load the machine, but a human needs to start the wash and help if it drops something). Still, the company has embarked on a mass data collection drive to train the robots’ Helix neural network to better complete more types of tasks._ --- Oct 17, 2025 9:42 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Conservationists Say They Spotted ‘Extinct’ Dolphin in Yangtze River](/video/d3bmiO5d/) ### Conservationists Say They Spotted ‘Extinct’ Dolphin in Yangtze River [Robotic Cockroaches to Help Save Lives in Disasters](/video/Pkyw8xrp/) ### Robotic Cockroaches to Help Save Lives in Disasters [Robotic Bees Take Flight](/video/XkcWDl46/) ### Robotic Bees Take Flight --- ## Transcript So figure designs and manufacturers humanoid robots, and the goal is to be able to do as much stuff a human can as possible in the physical world. We think of a lot of ourselves as trying to give. This is kind of a creepy, but trying to give AI body. How do we ultimately send robots out to the world to do everything from work in the commercial market? And then ultimately, we want to put a robot in every home in the world laundry, dishes, cleaning up the house, uh, basically everything that a human can do in the physical world over time, we'd like a humanoid to do. In late September, time's cover shoot was a domestic affair with a humanoid robot called the Figure three. It's the latest creation of figure AI, a California based startup backed by more than $1 billion in funding, which is building towards a future where humanoid robots make human labor a thing of the past. Time witnessed the figure three load a dishwasher, clear clutter and fold clothes. But even in this tightly controlled environment, the robot often struggled. The dream of general robotics, it seems, is still a long way from becoming a reality. So there were some occasions where I was watching the robot folding towels and loading a washer, and it's kind of clear that it can kind of do those things pretty well. But there were times when one of the towels dropped out of the washer and it was unable to pick it up. So, like, how do you get from there to your vision of general robotic overlord that can do anything you want it to? Yeah. Overlord. Nice. Um, I think the short answer is we feel like data fixes almost all of this at this point, and we've seen that in almost all the demonstrations we do where even in the early stages, like we like would say towel folding or like the logistics use case, like it just like, wasn't that great? Made a bunch of mistakes. As we add more data, it got like faster. It made less mistakes, still had some mistakes there. And all that is sort of like asymptotically approaching zero, like getting close to human levels in terms of like, like we can run them for like hours and hours and it just like performs really well. Large language models like ChatGPT prove that if you scale up the amount of data and computing power used to train a neural network, it would gain surprising new capabilities across the board. Figure is one of a group of companies attempting to apply that insight to robotics. The companies spending big to collect video data of humans performing tasks like folding clothes and cleaning homes, in a bid to teach robots to do the same thing. The big question is will it work? The company says early experiments have already yielded promising results. Some of the last generation of robot. The figure two are already working in a BMW factory in South Carolina. Moving parts that ultimately make it into the BMW X3. One of our core focuses in the roadmap here is how do we ship robots basically into every consumer home in the world? We want to do what we do all day in the home. And just like things I hate, like I don't want to do laundry, I don't want to do dishes, I don't want to clean up the house. And we haven't really had any, like large breakthroughs in the home in terms of automation for decades. So our view is that the robot will not only act as like your companion in your home, being able to share, like, very deep memory and be able to like basically talk to you basically just with speech and then ultimately be able to do everything you do in the home that you don't want to do. But upon its launch this October, the figure three won't be ready for your home. Not only is the robot not yet useful enough to be an android butler, but figure says it also has many unsolved safety challenges. Large language models are notorious for sometimes going off the rails, and that controllability problem will extend to the systems that power humanoid robots, too. There's also the problem of ensuring that the robot doesn't fall over, cause property damage, or injure its human cohabitants. Getting the robot to be extremely safe in the home long term is a really hard problem, I would say. Now we're tracking like almost like 15 different areas for safety. There's like a physical safety thing of like the system safety engineering needs to be done really well. There's like cybersecurity that we need to do really well. How do we do encryption at scale? We have a safety lead here that previously worked on basically mobile robotics. We have a cybersecurity lead that came from one of the top groups in cybersecurity here in the US. They each have teams and we're basically trying to spend basically a large focus on trying to figure out how do we enter, um, first, which will be US homes and then global, uh, and in a safe way and do high performance work. If there's even a small chance that this audacious company can succeed in its goal, the implications would be world changing. With the global population expected to peak this century before heading into decline, the arrival of robots might allow the world economy to continue growing, even as human labor becomes less abundant. Thanks to robots, the cost of goods and services might plummet, potentially enabling an increased quality of life for all. But liberating humans from work would also mean liberating them from their paychecks. Robots would do the same for manual labor, as cloud based AI threatens to do for office work, creating a joblessness crisis that Adcock says should be addressed with some form of universal basic income. At the same time, though, this billionaire entrepreneur is already calculating how to win control of what he expects to be a $40 trillion industry and one that tends towards monopoly. You're making like a synthetic human, right? That's like really cheap. It works like seven days a week, like 20 to 24 hours a day, and, like, just wants to keep working and learning. How many cheap humans, synthetic humans, could you sell in the world to do stuff? I mean, I think billions in the workforce for sure. I think every human would want one. So you have like close to 10 billion there. I do feel there'll be a point probably in the Bay area first, where you walk out and you see more humanoids than humans. Yeah. It's gonna be here, right? Uh, and that'll feel like it'll feel crazy. I look at this like, you know, I grew up reading a bunch of, you know, a bunch of crazy sci fi and dreaming of this, but I think it'll be amazing to have, like, humanoids out and about. And you can talk to, like, a human. You can do. You can basically do things for you as a companion. Knows you better than probably maybe anybody else. Um, so I'm really looking forward to it. We're not designing robots to harm humans or weaponize things like this. 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